tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56578292902491195152020-04-26T17:21:15.844+09:00Camilo Chéstream of writingsKamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.comBlogger652125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-8079058182341082432017-01-20T14:01:00.001+09:002017-01-20T14:01:54.347+09:00Underground blues<p>I sing of happiness in little things<br /> a daughter who puts lipstick on my face<br /> the smile of a stranger when she sees my hat<br /> the dream of reading a poem to you one day<br /> the quiet jazz music they play in my café<br /> the traces of other minds on my computer screen<br /> the taste of hot coffee from a paper cup<br /> the tranquil fantasy of a world that could have been<br /> the clock&#8217;s nostalgic design from another land<br /> and how the minutes kiss the hour hand<br /> the sound of conversations in a foreign tongue<br /> my own longing for candid talk, subdued in a song<br /> that revels forever in all of the above,<br /> and how I wish to succumb to absent-minded love<br /> to sing the underground blues with all my force<br /> to eat the sweet fruit in our garden of metaphors<br /> I hum yesterday&#8217;s sadness in tomorrow&#8217;s drunken ears<br /> ears that stand on fearless heads, and I dream<br /> of sweet visions, of high words in the skies<br /> I am driving through a tunnel with the voltage in my thighs<br /> happiness is in little things, and that is alright:<br /> At the end of the tunnel, there is no light<br /> but the tunnel, my friends, is electrified</p> <blockquote class="instagram-media" style="background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="7"> <div style="padding: 8px;"></div> <div style="background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 62.52783964365256% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;"></div> <div style="padding: 8px;"> <p style="margin: 8px 0 0 0; padding: 0 4px;"><a style="color: #000; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BKk2JrmhdxD/" target="_blank">September 20th 2016 . A bum mode. . #street #sitting #holland #utrecht #bum #travel #parenting #노숙자 #거리 #네덜란드 #위트레흐트 #여행 #육아 . .</a></p> <p style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">A photo posted by Miru Choi (@nomadbabymiru) on <time style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;" datetime="2016-09-20T11:16:02+00:00">Sep 20, 2016 at 4:16am PDT</time></p> </div> </blockquote> <p><script src="//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js" async="" defer="defer"></script></p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-58291711116134296592017-01-13T14:50:00.001+09:002017-01-13T14:50:14.008+09:00Thank you for the kind birthday wishes!<p><a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2017/01/peach-blossom-in-spring.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2499" src="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2017/01/peach-blossom-in-spring.jpg" alt="peach-blossom-in-spring" width="600" height="398" /></a></p> <p>To all who wished me a happy birthday on our beloved social media, and in particular to those well wishers I couldn&#8217;t reply personally: Thank you very much for all your kind words, they inspire me to celebrate my 38th birthday with 365 days of inspiration.</p> <p>I am determined to keep up my writing in 2017. A lot of it will be shared here, as I garner the temerity to call these words &#8211; &#8220;Words! they said, mere words! What good are they if the world is ill? Without us, their worth is nil&#8221; &#8211; my gift to the world.</p> <p>The upcoming year will be one of political turmoil and unprecedented climatic and environmental hazard, or one in which we finally &#8216;get it right&#8217; organizing as a species &#8211; depending on your perspective, or filter bubble. What we need now is a healthy culture of political debate, in the face of ever more destructive and self-reinforcing events. The era of popular politicians who were able to balance and appeal to majorities (the Obamas, Merkel, and in my little country of birth, Rutte), seems to come to a close.</p> <p>Anyway, in this bizarre depoliticized era of ours I have to suppress the &#8216;correctness&#8217; to apologize for bringing up politics in a birthday thank you note, along with the temptation to add a smiley to this very sentence.</p> <h2>Let intelligent, empathetic, constructive, collaborative conversations reign supreme in 2017.</h2> <p>Thank you all!</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-30793366635977910862017-01-08T18:50:00.001+09:002017-01-08T18:50:20.723+09:00Could systemic change be catalyzed by effective altruism?<p><img class="alignright" src="https://sites.duke.edu/dubs/files/2014/01/Effective-Altruism.jpg" alt="" width="414" height="206" />Dear Prof. Peter Singer,</p> <p>I would like to convey my utmost gratitude for your extraordinary efforts related to the relief of animal cruelty and poverty. I applaud the approach of programs like <a href="https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/" target="_blank">Give what we can</a> because I think every dollar spent on things like malaria prevention, de-worming, girl&#8217;s education or clean drinking water as morally superior to lavish consumption.</p> <p>You will certainly have heard of the (in my view only) plausible objection to the practice of philanthropy, which is that it diverts our collective attention from much needed systemic change. Apart from allegations that institutions like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are effective ways to minimize taxation (to which I think the notion that people in the global south need it more than the IRS, is a legitimate response) there are people who claim that philanthropy gives moral justification to the status quo of structural and radical inequality and thus contributes to the inertia and numbs any revolutionary zeal towards overthrowing a system that is geared only towards the production of infinite growth, regardless of the social and environmental cost that by definition cannot be offset by philanthropy.</p> <p>To avoid misunderstanding, I have donated a modest inheritance myself to charitable causes during a journey to local charities in the global south in 2009, that I undertook after I realized that the PhD-thesis I wrote on our responsibility for future generations was mere theory. I went on to create a website, <a href="http://kindmankind.net" target="_blank">kindmankind.net</a>, connecting the &#8216;least connected&#8217;. This endeavor was miles away from fancy charities with glossy websites and central Manhattan office space. It was also largely ignored because it was not an incorporated, &#8216;authorized&#8217;, official, trickle-down institution. It was (and is &#8211; I run it at near-zero marginal cost) just an open source platform for and by the people to enable and encourage sharing of resources, mainly knowledge. This is not to say it is morally superior to the &#8216;charity-industrial complex&#8217; (it isn&#8217;t). The vision behind my project is merely more radical in that it anticipates the necessary systemic change away from the neoliberalist status quo that, I believe, reproduces the very structural inequality it provides band-aid for through well-intended philanthropy.</p> <p>Of course large-scale philanthropy is infinitely better than the IMF-imposed structural adjustment or the debt bondage of entire countries and the effective appropriation of their resources by the wealthier lender countries. Philanthropy, necessary as it may be during the transition to an economic system that is compatible with our planet, should always have a clear and realistic idea about the systemic change that is needed to render itself, ultimately, unnecessary.</p> <p>Thus, my question to the effective altruism community is as follows: Could necessary systemic change be catalyzed by effective altruism? Which long term vision for the world is upheld among its advocates and how do they describe the path to get there? Do effective altruists welcome ideas that principally question neoliberal dogma, such as the <a href="http://commonstransition.org/" target="_blank">Commons</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_production" target="_blank">peer production</a> movements?</p> <p>I would welcome a discussion of these issues with people involved with the effective altruism movement, who I hold in high esteem for both the intentions and the consequences of their actions.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-72678018861784208072016-12-30T17:50:00.001+09:002016-12-30T17:50:54.505+09:00Bubbles<figure style="width: 415px;" class="wp-caption alignright"><img class="" src="http://il2.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/1226980/thumb/1.jpg" alt="" width="415" height="234" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">bubbles are not seasonal</figcaption></figure> <p>During the last days of a year that was filled with the perceived horrors of the untimely death of several celebrity actors and popstars, as well as the real horror of the destruction of Aleppo, I want to sit back and reflect.</p> <p>A word that illustrates our quick march towards unadulterated cynicism that characterized the year 2016 is &#8216;filter bubble&#8217;. In a world of &#8216;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM" target="_blank">hypernormalisation</a>&#8216;, to use the phrase of Adam Curtis&#8217; recent documentary, people see their own (political) convictions projected and reaffirmed on their screens, because that&#8217;s what the algorithms decide. The unbounded desire for such reaffirmation justifies the emerging<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo" target="_blank"> fake-news industry</a>. The truth, as usual assumed to be some principally attainable substantive, dies first according to the <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2113246-how-can-facebook-and-its-users-burst-the-filter-bubble/" target="_blank">media theorists</a> who study the phenomenon.</p> <p>So, 2016 was a year in which, entirely according to taste, democratic capitalism irrevocably embarked on a journey to hell, lined by the croaking voices of Farage and Trump; it was the year in which climate change became so terrifyingly obvious (last November, the North Pole was <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/the-north-pole-is-36-degrees-hotter-than-it-should-be-right-now" target="_blank">20 degrees hotter</a> than it should be) that the academic question, according to <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/noam-chomsky-climate-change-nuclear-war-2131865192.html" target="_blank">Noam Chomsky</a> whom I admittedly worship too much, becomes which hell do we reach first.</p> <blockquote class="highlight"><p>2016 was a year in which, entirely according to taste, democratic capitalism irrevocably embarked on a journey to hell, lined by the croaking voices of Farage and Trump</p></blockquote> <p>Basking in my very own bubble, what can I say that penetrates this bubble? Shouldn&#8217;t I restrict myself to the Socratic admonition of the impossibility of real knowledge? Even if I would have expert knowledge and understanding of what is going on in the world, how could I convince anybody that such knowledge is not ultimately dependent on my own bubble and should hence be discarded by those living outside of it?</p> <p>I&#8217;m sure that you have, like me, engaged in many discussions on social media throughout 2016. I have argued about <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2012/12/12/very-bad-vs-downright-catastrophic-climate-change/" target="_blank">climate change</a>, environmental degradation, the <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2009/11/13/november-2-move-it-on-to-syria/" target="_blank">Syrian civil war</a>, the <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2016/05/13/p2p-housing-experiment/" target="_blank">sharing economy</a>, the <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2016/06/15/in-defence-of-the-basic-income/" target="_blank">universal basic income</a>, the European refugee crisis, Brexit, and many other things. When I decide to contribute, I try to be unsure about my own position; I rather &#8216;try out&#8217; arguments, curious of where they might lead to. It could only give us more truth, if we believe in discursive progress (as we must). Anyway, I have managed to avoid wholesale identification with liberal, conservative or radical ideologies, but sadly in a culture that mistakes critical assessment for hostility, this might have precluded some lasting (online) philosophical friendships.</p> <p>So, here is my wish for the new year 2017. Calmness of mind and &#8211; allow me to weave the metaphor further &#8211; the build-up of pressure to destroy filter bubbles and the theoretical frames of mind that keep inflating them. All that a philosopher can wish for on the verge of a new year is the love of wisdom and the leaden knowledge (as poor Plato found out) that we don&#8217;t have a recipe for building the right society &#8211; that all we can and should do is pop some bubbles.</p> <p>As for me, I hope to buckle up, ramble on and inspire other minds to the simple joy of the oldest technology that doesn&#8217;t pollute the environment: language. I wish my readers the sustained inspiration they need for a gentle descent into the abyss that political and environmental pundits alike so dramatically promise us, or, should the pundits be wrong (they too live in their own bubble, after all) the ability to recognize and utilize the tiniest window of opportunity that humanity might have to get out of this mess.</p> <p>Happy New Year!</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-51023985559772270012016-10-19T08:49:00.001+09:002016-10-19T08:49:53.611+09:00Where's Bob?<p><img class="alignright" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Bob_Dylan_Barcelona.jpg/450px-Bob_Dylan_Barcelona.jpg" alt="" width="335" height="524" /><i>I leave the guitar and Bob&#8217;s voice to your imagination; singin&#8217; volunteers and suggestions welcome!</i></p> <p>Bob, where are you Bob?<br /> Are you staying in bed, did you catch the flu<br /> why is it so hard to get through to you?<br /> do you have the blues, so many writer would<br /> love to walk in your shoes Bob, even Philip Roth<br /> would stop and he would be learning how to siiiiiiiiiiiiiing<br /> &#8217;cause you know, the times they are a-changin&#8217;</p> <p>Bob, where are you Bob?<br /> you&#8217;re a poet everyone knows you&#8217;re the screeching voice of your generation<br /> that saw the blood on the tracks and where we&#8217;re going to with our civilization<br /> and your woeful guitar sounds, painted the blues in the face of a sordid nation<br /> we&#8217;ve been knockin&#8217; on your door for days now, and tried to call you up on the phone<br /> but you answer was silence, tell us Bob do you really want to be left all alone?</p> <p>Bob, where are you Bob?<br /> we need you now, you&#8217;re a legendary man, you speak the truth through your teeth<br /> your shrieking voice&#8217; echo lives in the ears of everyone and the world lies at your feet<br /> you&#8217;re an all American troubadour, a man who lives for the poetry in his bone<br /> sing us song, sing us the ballad, of a thin man, who&#8217;s tangled up in blue and all alone<br /> write us howling verses like no other can not even tom waits and leonard cohen<br /> there&#8217;s a crackle in everything, that&#8217;s how the light gets in and you&#8217;ve known<br /> we are your fans bob zimmerman, tell us are you too busy being born to condone<br /> a Nobel prize, or are you too busy dying?</p> <p>Bob, where are you Bob?<br /> Man up, mister tambourine, look back at the trinkets in your prize vitrine<br /> do you see the Grammy and the Pulitzer catching dust it has never been<br /> a better time Bob, now we all got visions of Johanna, and we all feel forever young<br /> and you know how much love was made, in the mighty echo of your soooooooongs<br /> I hate driving down highway 61 and hearing on the radio that the committee will rescind<br /> what do you say Bob, or is your answer forever blowing in the wiiiiiiind</p> <p>Bob, where are you Bob?<br /> I see you sitting by the campfire of history, singing about war and the marginalized<br /> you raised your broken voice, and millions of people were moved, to paradise<br /> the world wants to hear your chuckle and see the sparkling in your eyes<br /> when you surpassed so many bitter literates and got your Nobel priiiiiiiize</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-40745453558212887652016-10-11T20:49:00.001+09:002016-10-11T20:49:38.586+09:00Pokemon Ghost<p>hyper-realistic human holograms of virtual citizens. You can only interact with them through your phone.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-47546908803738658232016-09-27T09:11:00.001+09:002016-09-27T09:11:24.853+09:00envy is not a sin<p><img class="alignright" src="http://www.bookpage.com/the-book-case/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Nobel_medal_dsc06171-250x250.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="250" />before you got published, you were jealous of someone who did</p> <p>when you got published, you were jealous of someone who got a second print</p> <p>when you got a second print, you were jealous of someone who sold 100,000 copies</p> <p>when you sold 100,000 copies, you were jealous of someone who won the Booker Prize</p> <p>when you won the Booker Prize, you were jealous of someone who won the Nobel Prize</p> <p>when you won the Nobel Prize, you farted during your acceptance speech</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-44376433387797350292016-08-07T20:51:00.001+09:002016-08-07T20:51:35.895+09:00we hasten not<p>it is high noon and the bright fruits shine<br /> in the air is a promise of decay</p> <p>we let the sun pour its old light on us<br /> and bury imagination in warm smiles</p> <p>we save up for higher seasons, for longer shadows<br /> for deeper promises and gentler declines</p> <p>slow and infinite are our thoughts, we hasten not<br /> we are like the dream of an old animal who goes to die</p> <p>that way our freedom is no longer tasteless and we<br /> can press our cold mouths against each other to live</p> <p>from the words that remain like berries on a charred plant<br /> from the cold shades wherein we wield each other&#8217;s power</p> <p>are you there, my children, ready to celebrate the story as a story<br /> and to fall in love a hundred times </p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-16045597333838062952016-06-23T18:18:00.001+09:002016-06-23T18:18:38.119+09:00Relabeling<p>Since it has become part of my daily life I would like to describe once again my thoughts about cop<a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2016/06/bsjob.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-2473" src="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2016/06/bsjob-300x266.jpg" alt="bsjob" width="300" height="266" /></a>ing with bullshit labor. <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2015/11/01/bullshit-job-rap/">Bullshit jobs</a>, to me, are characterized by a complete lack of meaning. No matter how hard you try, you can&#8217;t discern a core of value in a <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2015/12/17/poetry-in-times-of-bullshit-jobs/">bullshit job</a>, and this is after you have discussed the idea that &#8216;meaning is subjective anyway&#8217;.</p> <p>They are something else than nasty tasks you don&#8217;t like to perform, such as, say, garbage collecting. If you are employed in such a profession, you probably know it has a purpose. The world would be worse off without garbage collectors, a glance at strikes in Napoli will reassure you. The same argument could be made for miners, soldiers, factory workers to the extent that they are able to choose their profession freely.</p> <p>But not for bullshit jobs. You recognize a bullshit job because the people performing it cannot believe the world is any better off with the existence of the company they are working for. It is not about the inevitable &#8216;boring&#8217; work that comes with any job (such as a lecturer&#8217;s administration). There is nothing that can redeem the boring task. No cleaner world, no rescued children, no advancement of science, no more beautiful world our hearts believe in.</p> <p>The bullshit job is an illness of capitalism that has become too fast for our culture. It is an occupation that generates profit by leveraging old inefficiencies and habits. The world would be better off when the entire realm, everything they stand for, would disappear overnight.</p> <p>And still, I do it. I am a bullshit job survivor.</p> <p>Performing a bullshit job is a mind numbing experience. I cope by relabeling a job session as a music session and listen to music while I type away (bullshit jobs, as a rule, require very little creativity and concentration). Listening to a Mozart sonata while typing away on my keyboard (I believe these keystrokes add up to translations and websites and marketing copy) can actually become a somewhat fulfilling experience. If I&#8217;m in the mood, I can identify with the virtuoso at the real keyboard. I am Brendel or Barenboim, while the bullshit job &#8216;generates&#8217; (that is the core illusion) about one dollar per minute.</p> <p>It is still devoid of any meaning, but it might be as good as it gets.</p> <p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZZqSZqJz4Y" width="420" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-12578191178679136412016-06-16T02:41:00.001+09:002016-06-16T02:41:46.028+09:00In defence of the basic income<p>There are some very good arguments for the basic income, eloquently summed up in numerous articles such as this piece in the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/13/should-we-scrap-benefits-and-pay-everyone-100-a-week-whether-they-work-or-not" target="_blank">Guardian</a>. Personally, I feel good about the idea of a basic income. After a decade of open-source writing, I wouldn&#8217;t want to change my habit. Whatever is really meaningful, we share diligently, enthusiastically and at zero marginal cost. Asking a monetary reward for it is a conflict of my own interests. So nothing comes more natural than the humble dream: If only my basic needs (and more importantly: the basic needs of my family) were taken care of, I could pursue my proper interest &#8211; the pursuit of our own interests is the only way we can contribute to a society with a steadily increasing automation, where uninteresting things are done by robots anyway.</p> <blockquote class="highlight"><p>Basic income culture is secular religion.</p></blockquote> <p>I would feel fundamentally thankful. I claim that a majority of people share this feeling. Society explicitly tells them they are an end in themselves, because they are awarded an income that doesn&#8217;t depend on their contribution. Thou shalt eat, whether or not you work. I would go even further: People will break the bread they buy from their unconditional income together. The unconditionality will occupy a space that has been vacant since the erosion of the Church. The old God loved all of his children unconditionally and the new &#8220;God&#8221; will, too. The unconditionality is fundamental. The fetish of justice that has become so apparent in the current welfare state, is replaced by a primordial trust, which means: blind trust. The priest who pretends to mediate between you and your God is replaced by the community (not necessarily the state) that has already acknowledged your value, unconditionally.</p> <p>The history of religion proves that people are deeply touched by this. People begin to feel they belong when they have been declared to belong. They will develop a gratitude and a profound passion to improve the community that has unconditionally labelled them <em>valuable</em>. Basic income culture is secular religion.</p> <p>The difference with state communism is of course that it is fundamentally democratic. State planned enterprises staffed by a bored proletariat that has succumbed to the propaganda machine are replaced with co-ops where all owners have a stake and jointly enjoy the fruit of their labor. They are intrinsically motivated and invested in their enterprise, and that is precisely the reason why they won&#8217;t automate away their jobs.</p> <h2>Experiments, please</h2> <p>Of course, such theoretical ideas will need to be tested as rigorously as possible. And fortunately, this is happening in the former bastions of social democratic glory, <a href="http://www.basicincome.org/news/2015/12/finland-basic-income-experiment-what-we-know/" target="_blank">Finland</a>, Sweden, the <a href="http://www.fastcoexist.com/3055679/a-dutch-city-is-experimenting-with-giving-away-a-basic-income-of-1000-a-month" target="_blank">Netherlands </a>among other places. I think this experimental approach is very important, because it could temporarily silence the ideological dichotomy that roars in the underbelly of our debate.</p> <p>I like to see more basic income-experiments that are not borne out of the desire to vindicate a specific proposed model, but out of a genuine scientific interest. This implies that we should try out more parameters. For example: the UBI is a wonderful chance for direct democracy. Rather than pundits and apparatchiks, why not let the beneficiaries themselves set the amount of the basic income? Why should the amount be fixed and the same for everyone? Why should it be paid monthly? Or even, why should the UBI be individualistic? Why not try out a UBI that is awarded to a small group of people who share it? Or, why be dogmatic about unconditionality? Why not try to limit it to people with modest consumption patterns (e.g. buying a fuel-guzzling car puts you on a red list)? Why not experiment with a foodstamp-like system, a basic income that can be spent only on certain basic goods and services?</p> <p>We can learn a lot from such experiments. However, we need more than the testimony of a basic Incomer who has victoriously concluded twelve months of meaningful occupation and brought significant happiness to his own community. We need more because the basic income implies a<span style="text-decoration: underline;"> radical shift of power</span> that is overlooked in the technocratic approach, and power is of course never relinquished and handed over voluntarily.</p> <h2>Fundamental power shift</h2> <p>The Universal Basic Income (UBI) shifts the power to the post-workers. The proletariat is no longer dependent on the factory to survive. They now have bargaining power. In Marxist terms: The labor market becomes more like a potato market. When workers are structurally scarce, businesses will need to either optimize working conditions or make labor redundant. This makes workplace automation (robots, AI) even more competitive, which further increases the need for a basic income.</p> <p>Will people stop doing the nasty work? Authors like Jeremy <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work" target="_blank">Rifkin </a>and Paul <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/17/automation-may-mean-a-post-work-society-but-we-shouldnt-be-afraid" target="_blank">Mason </a>counter this by pointing at the advent of automation which has made the nasty work a lot less nasty than a few decades ago (think of modern garbage trucks) and made a lot of the nasty work simply disappear (think of automated production lines). So what about the remaining nasty jobs, the jobs that are mind-numbing yet not (economically) automated? Here looms the revolutionary potential of the UBI. While automation has slashed a lot of nasty work, the UBI will give workers negotiating power. So there will be very few nasty jobs left that can&#8217;t be profitably automated. And that is precisely the point: The UBI catalyzes the third industrial revolution and the transformational shift to post-capitalism. In other words: The culture around the UBI would manifest an unprecedented rebalancing of power, that today, in our networked society, we have a chance to achieve without a <a href="http://bloodyrevolution.com/" target="_blank">bloody revolution</a>.</p> <p>Henry Ford&#8217;s insight, that he had to make sure his workers can buy the very cars they produce, becomes obsolete. Wages cease to be the main lever that controls consumer spending. Workers who have &#8220;seized the means of a basic livelihood&#8221; can and will demand meaningful work and co-ownership. I think the radical nature of this shift is often overlooked in the debate about the basis income. Unions won&#8217;t negotiate the level of worker exploitation, but the level of worker ownership. It is as Jeremy Rifkin says: capitalism will become a fringe game serving niche markets.</p> <p>But there is another aspect that heralds the end of capitalism.</p> <h2>Footing the bill</h2> <p>The Thatcherite quote that &#8220;ultimately, you run out of other people&#8217;s money&#8221; is a vulgarity. Still, apart from ill-perceived theories about human nature, the presumably exorbitant cost of the UBI is one of the main arguments against it.<br /> <blockquote class="highlight">the UBI guarantees a basic level of aggregate demand that companies can build and be built on.</blockquote></p> <p>Calculations typically show that the basic income is only slightly more expensive than the current welfare system in Western European countries. The extra money should come of course from more taxes, and these taxes are mainly anti-capitalist.<a href="http://www.unternimm-die-zukunft.de/de/" target="_blank">Götz Werner</a>, founder of the German drugstore chain DM, proposes a dramatic increase in value added tax. This would lead of course to a decrease in consumption, something opponents of endless economic growth would applaud. I don&#8217;t think the economy would spiral into a recession because the UBI guarantees a basic level of aggregate demand that companies can build and be built on. Rather than sliding into misery or &#8216;stagflation&#8217;, the economy would reset itself at a more sustainable level.</p> <p>Other taxes, such as the financial transaction &#8216;Tobin&#8217;-tax (<a href="https://www.attac.org/" target="_blank">attac</a>) or direct wealth tax (Piketty) also shift the power to control the economy away from capital towards the community.</p> <p>Of course society can pay for a basic income. The question is, are we ready for its post-capitalist implications?</p> <h2>The psychology of the basic income</h2> <p>The post-capitalist notion of putting power in the hands of the community (the post-workers) raises issues about fairness because communities consist of individuals, some of whom appear not to be &#8216;deserving&#8217;. I assume that people who have a successful traditional career will feel different about a basic income than those who couldn&#8217;t get a job. Why should everybody have the right to be, at a basic level, <i>secure</i> when they worked all their lives to keep insecurity at bay? This lies at the heart of our social instinct. Homo sapiens, having evolved as a small social primate, has a very vivid imagination of the figure of the &#8216;free rider&#8217;, a vermin he needs to keep his community clear of by all means.</p> <blockquote class="highlight"><p>Culture puts us in a state of elevated desperation.</p></blockquote> <p>Beyond our fairness instinct, there is another mental habit that causes a hostile attitude towards the basic income. The patronizing argument from psychology is that we need our worries. They make life meaningful. It should be a human right not to be too much secured. Our actions should be guaranteed to be meaningful to ourselves because we are dependent on them in order to survive. Life is not only about taking risks, but about being thrown into them in a Heideggerian fashion. If society deprives us of our existential worries or mocks them by feeding everybody unconditionally, wouldn&#8217;t we fall into apathy and utter meaninglessness? There is nothing so inhumane, in this line of thought, as a free lunch.</p> <p>But isn&#8217;t culture about elevating the level of this existential worry, to less cruel, short and brutish, yet still <em>subjectively</em> precarious predicaments? Our ancestors improved their lot from the worry of being eaten alive by wild animals to the worry of not harvesting enough grain to survive the winter. In today&#8217;s societies, people worry about not having enough money, which implies homelessness, chronic hunger and social degradation. Why keep people in unnecessary worries about their basic needs? Their worry is existential and it can consume people. A higher culture, I claim, maintains the sense of urgency (the way the worries create meaning) but overcomes the unnecessary physical violence. It is able to &#8216;gamify&#8217; the existential. Seeing your team lose a soccer match can cause real distress, but it doesn&#8217;t debilitate you, or permanently influence your capacity to contribute to your community. Culture puts us in a state of elevated desperation that allows people &#8211; especially the more fearful characters among us &#8211; to thrive as soon as their they don&#8217;t need to worry about their meager welfare.</p> <h2>Inequality</h2> <p>Such considerations, however, leave the issue of structural inequality untouched. Does the UBI preserve, or exacerbate inequality? It seems that, because everybody receives it, money that could have gone to the needy ends up in the pockets of the wealthy, while the basic income will not be sufficient for certain groups, such as the physically <a href="http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52010DC0636&amp;from=EN" target="_blank">disabled</a>. They will need additional support, necessitating in part the very bureaucracy that the UBI was designed to overcome. I think this is based on a misunderstanding of the idea. It cannot replace other systems that support the disabled. The UBI is a no-nonsense social safety net. The fact that most models propose an equal amount for everyone has a pragmatic reason: it does away with case-by-case review and captures most people&#8217;s intuition of fairness.</p> <p>A <a href="http://revenudebase.info/comprendre-le-revenu-de-base/argumentaire/" target="_blank">French </a>blog made another critical point. The UBI rewards people because of their nationality. A European country can not possibly promise a basic income to all its residents, because foreigners would move there just to enjoy the UBI. But if only French nationals receive a &#8216;revenu de base&#8217; it will create a new lower class of foreign residents. This would reintroduce the very class difference the UBI was supposed to overcome. This is indeed a conundrum, but again it depends on the implementation. There are no easy answers here. A EU-wide basic income is probably a bridge too far, even for Yannis Varoufakis. Introducing a certain degree of conditionality (speaking a language, being integrated) seems to defeat the purpose of making our bureaucracies leaner.</p> <blockquote class="highlight"><p>Peer to peer commons management in the spirit of stewardship rather than extractivism, will flourish in a basic income world.</p></blockquote> <p>I think we can respond like this. The perverse and structural wealth and income inequality in our society cannot be reversed with the standard economic toolbox of stimulus and austerity or within the mainstream political spectrum. The basic income in itself will not change that. But the UBI is part of a bigger package.</p> <p>When the poor have a guaranteed livelihood, they could form co-operatives. Worker-owned enterprises will thrive. How do they attract investors? Crowdfunding. With their income secured, people will be a lot more willing to take risks, and to invest in projects or co-ops they believe in. I think that this fundamental restructuring towards a more lateral power structure is what <a href="https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Michel_Bauwens" target="_blank">Michel Bauwens</a> also envisions. Peer to peer commons management through &#8216;phyles&#8217;, in the spirit of stewardship rather than &#8216;extractivism&#8217;, will flourish in a basic income world. It is insightful to recall that the software commons are already managed this way, by volunteers (Linux, Apache, Mozilla) who typically don&#8217;t have to worry about food on the table because of their six-figure tech salaries.</p> <p>This spirit would spread to other domains. Currently, it is financially risky to give up your <a href="https://thebillfold.com/the-more-your-job-helps-others-the-less-you-get-paid-1f248ddf1916?gi=a68021d7096f" target="_blank">bullshitjob </a>and become, say, an organic farmer. How would it pay the rent, is the first question. Very few such businesses survive their first year, which makes it in turn hard to get a bank loan, although local organic agriculture is not capital intensive. Managing our collective Commons will make a lot of sense to a lot of people. The UBI will take away a lot of fear, and could make our existential worries more productive.</p> <h2>The basic income as a commons</h2> <p>I like to understand the universal basic income as a <i>commons</i>. We can understand its cultural implications when we take other commons as a metaphor. Consider for example another commons (or as the neoliberals would say: unsolicited government service): physical infrastructure such as sidewalks. People don&#8217;t think twice before using them. Without them, survival in a big city would be a lot harder and people would be a lot less efficient. Of course, it is intuitively clear to everyone that it is virtually impossible to charge a usage fee for sidewalks. Imagine turnstiles on every street corner, and check-out sweeps when you take a taxi or enter a building. The bureaucratic overhead to deal with fees and fines would be a lot bigger than the cost of maintaining the sidewalks (granted, they are in notoriously bad shape in many US cities).</p> <blockquote class="highlight"><p>If you don&#8217;t voluntarily replenish the commons, you are a silly, unrealistic loser.</p></blockquote> <p>Furthermore, treating the UBI as a commons will have implications on the idea of commons management. The juxtaposition of the commons and private property, as if they serve opposed purposes, becomes obsolete (Elinor Ostrom). Traditional commons (air, water, land, airwaves) are indispensable, but they don&#8217;t provide everything. Narratives about the &#8216;tragedy of the commons&#8217;, essentially proto-propaganda for the concentration of power in a few hands, have become an integral part of the economic culture. People who voluntarily replenish the commons were described as silly, unrealistic losers. With the basic income as a commons, the narrative is replaced. If you don&#8217;t voluntarily replenish the commons, you are a silly, unrealistic loser (with very few likes on Facebook).</p> <p>Pedestrians don&#8217;t need to think about it so they can focus on where they&#8217;re going to. The sidewalk is part of the marketplace. It enables economic interactions because it gives buyer and seller access to stores. You pay for the sidewalk when you buy something in the store, through taxes. But it&#8217;s absurd to think you&#8217;re not entitled to use the sidewalk unless you buy something.</p> <p>The basic income would be like a sidewalk. It gives people access to the post-capitalist &#8216;marketplace&#8217;, the place of social interaction we use to call shops. People can navigate the &#8216;sidewalk of being&#8217; without fear of hunger and homelessness, and meet each other on an equal footing. If there is an opportunity for the production of value, they will jump at it (what else does <em>value</em> mean?). The UBI only makes sure that nothing holds them back. For those with a neoliberal taste, it gives all people access to the marketplace of ideas. For communitarian thinkers, it allows people to be not only in pursuit of happiness, but actually happy. And happy people <i>are</i> value, not just creators of value.</p> <p><a href="http://www.basicincome.org/" target="_blank">Basic Income Network</a></p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-78200780598049302582016-05-14T00:55:00.001+09:002016-05-14T00:55:22.003+09:00p2p housing experiment<p>We are a Dutch-Korean family; our daughter was born in 2013. We work as <b>independent writers</b> and we get by. We are not dependent on any specific location for our work, so when we choose where we want to live we ask ourselves "do we fit in?" or "do people like us here because of who we are, not only because we pay the rent?"</p> <p>We believe that in the Age of Internet, &#8216;compatible&#8217; people can find each other online, as neighbors, as housemates, as friends. If people just provide an honest description of themselves and send it away as a <b>message in a digital bottle</b>.</p> <p>So, here is our <b>social experiment</b>: We are looking for a roof over our head anywhere in <b>Northern Europe </b>for the coming summer. We can pay about 500 Euros per month. We like transparency and honest sharing. Apart from paying money (all up front if needed), we gladly love to clean, cook, babysit, garden, do maintenance work, run errands, create your website, or hug. The place should neither be large nor luxurious. What is important is that there are like minded people around. Remember: we are not begging. If you think this is begging, then you haven&#8217;t understood it. This is an attempt to increase overall happiness.</p> <p>View the full text here: <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2016/05/p2phome.pdf">p2phome</a>.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-19792445819932234392016-04-25T13:08:00.001+09:002016-04-25T13:08:39.190+09:00Fearless<p><a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2016/04/miruhanbok.jpg"><img class="wp-image-2432 alignright" src="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2016/04/miruhanbok.jpg" alt="miruhanbok" width="300" height="767" /></a>Dear Miru,</p> <p>There lives an intuition in me that wants you to be fearless. I know that fear has a vital function, but it only works when you experience it against the background of fearlessness. When your mind is troubled by unprocessed phobias, the fear that might have saved you will become useless and irrational. When you can&#8217;t fathom your angst, you won&#8217;t be able to face the music of your vital fear. That is why I introduced you to some mildly scary stuff, such as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.</p> <p>You enjoyed the movie and held my hand during the scary scenes, such as when the dinosaurs were chasing the children in the kitchen. A few days later, you remembered that scene well and told me that the &#8220;dinosaur is coming&#8221;, &#8220;kids watch out&#8221;, &#8220;auto boom&#8221;, &#8220;dinosaur is inside&#8221;. The dinosaur on the screen had gotten into your head and I questioned the merit of exposing you to this stuff.</p> <p>But you also experienced empathy with the children you saw on the screen, you understand <i>their</i> fear. Your father the dilettante neurologist only wanted to boost your mirror neurons a little bit, to shape you in the image of an all but forgotten god, as a larger than life demigod of solid empathy.</p> <p>Daddy got carried away. But I&#8217;m not afraid of learning on the job and introducing to the next sensation: Home Alone. It&#8217;s never too early to wire up for spite or Schadenfreude.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-33198633412816794892016-04-19T11:36:00.001+09:002016-04-19T11:36:11.948+09:00<p>It doesn&#8217;t matter much if we have hope now. Will we have hope when a majority of people are literally dying to improve our lot?</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-23889809617459625462016-04-07T14:18:00.001+09:002016-04-07T14:18:13.852+09:00Age of We<figure style="width: 320px;" class="wp-caption alignright"><img class="" src="http://36.media.tumblr.com/1606f793823a875925f6295d8dc0a1c1/tumblr_o4umcvhE6w1v71x6xo1_1280.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="1156" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Artwork by <a href="http://whatcamilledrawsandpaints.tumblr.com/">Camille van Neer</a></figcaption></figure> <p>seen from up here<br /> there is grace in<br /> everything</p> <p>seen from up here<br /> walls fence nothing<br /> in, or out. they are<br /> the dashed lines our<br /> children cut along</p> <p>seen from up here<br /> humanity is a flock<br /> of little birds. we<br /> see patterns and leap<br /> ahead, &#8216;wake up!&#8217;</p> <p>but up here our voice is thin<br /> and our gaze goes unmet<br /> we want to rain down<br /> and adhere to the world again</p> <p>let us speak with a voice<br /> that we borrow from each other,<br /> as if we could fathom the beauty<br /> of each other&#8217;s suspended freedom</p> <p>let us work together, restless<br /> ones and those who contemplate<br /> under a blossoming tree, for<br /> we all need to need each other</p> <p>let us blow up what we called egos<br /> to a plump raspberry goddess<br /> and laugh with her and dance</p> <p>as what we share is not material might<br /> it is a mirage, a mirage against<br /> the dying of the light</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-1200486981440315972016-04-06T12:52:00.001+09:002016-04-06T12:52:31.978+09:00Netpoetry #10<p>Relax. Give yourself a $500 neck massage. You are worth it.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-66900815374997912982016-03-13T19:05:00.001+09:002016-03-13T19:05:19.854+09:00the joy of writing<p>self-awareness boils in your bloodstream<br /> you feel immersed in the wanton inflation<br /> of the infinite hole that homes you,<br /> and keeps you dissolving into that heightened state<br /> of mind, so you can push the buttons<br /> or beings loopiness.</p> <p>now two minds in such a state<br /> will smile at each other as two<br /> monads, on a good day they<br /> can see the scaffolding<br /> of each other&#8217;s universe</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-24462819908846161102016-03-07T00:56:00.001+09:002016-03-07T00:56:17.711+09:00What is a ball?<p><img class="alignright" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/C60a.png" alt="" width="300" height="441" />Dear Miru,</p> <p>We were playing with a ball today, but you said it wasn&#8217;t a ball. Or, as you put it, that the ball was &#8220;kapot&#8221;. You meant that the ball lacked significantly in &#8220;ballness&#8221;; that its &#8220;ballness&#8221; was broken. I understand your intuition: The ball we were playing with didn&#8217;t look like any other ball you know. It was round, okay, but there were so many holes in it. In fact, it was more hole than ball. It was more like the skeleton of a ball.</p> <p>This is a sphere, according to the dictionary:</p> <blockquote><p>&#8220;A three-dimensional closed surface such that every point on the surface is equidistant from the center&#8221;</p></blockquote> <p>Clearly, the ball doesn&#8217;t have a closed surface, so it&#8217;s not a sphere. Here&#8217;s what the dictionary says about a ball:</p> <blockquote><p>An object with a spherical shape</p></blockquote> <p>I think they call our toy a &#8220;buckyball&#8221;, after Buckminster Fuller, who discovered large molecules (fullerenes) with a large empty cage and at least 60 carbon atoms. A buckyball is just a spheroidal fullerene.</p> <p>But how can we know? This definition seems pretty useless. We can do better than the dictionary and come up with a definition of the ball ourselves, ok? See, what makes the ball a ball? Not the fact that it is perfectly spherical (what about a ball with a small dent in it or a football that is a bit deflated?).</p> <p>Let&#8217;s look at some properties of the ball. What do you think about rolling? Isn&#8217;t a ball something that rolls?<br /> But wheels also roll.<br /> Yes. So let&#8217;s correct it. What do you think about something that rolls in every direction?<br /> Ok. But there are some weird shapes that can also roll in every direction. For example, a giant rubber dice with rounded edges. This is clearly not a ball.<br /> Ok. What do you think about something that rolls in every direction at a constant speed? That means it must be round, and we can test its roundness by rolling the ball in every direction and measuring the speed.<br /> But what about the ellipsoid ball they use in rugby? They call that a ball too. Should we make an exception or say it is not a &#8220;real&#8221; ball?<br /> Maybe we can say it should roll at at most three different, constant speeds in every direction? That will rule out the really weird shapes with humps and dents and shapes that don&#8217;t have any apparent symmetry.</p> <p>So we came up with a definition of a &#8220;ball&#8221;. It&#8217;s probably not perfect, but its enough for today.</p> <blockquote><p>An object that rolls at at most three different, constant speeds in every direction.</p></blockquote> <p>You seem to accept our definition. The ball is not &#8220;kapot&#8221; anymore &#8211; you repaired it, just with your mind.</p> <p><i>This is an example of what my daughter and I are developing as a series about &#8220;philosophy for children&#8221;. Any suggestions are welcome</i></p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-1153029155202417942016-03-06T10:18:00.001+09:002016-03-06T10:18:20.721+09:00#BernieSanders<p><a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2016/03/tt.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2404" src="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2016/03/tt.jpg" alt="tt" width="300" height="600" /></a></p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-21556222175344157312016-02-20T03:44:00.001+09:002016-02-20T03:44:20.253+09:00Pope vs. Trump<p><img class="alignright" src="http://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/DonaldTrump-1.png" alt="" width="182" height="122" /></p> <p><a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/18/health/zika-pope-francis-contraceptives/" target="_blank">Pope Francis</a> has stated that &#8220;avoiding pregnancy&#8221; (as opposed to abortion) is not an absolute evil, and spoke out in favor of the use of contraceptives to avoid the spread of the Zika virus. In the case of certain other viruses, he added, contraception is not only an understandable decision, but one that could count on God&#8217;s wholehearted approval, such as would have been the case for the parents of Donald Trump.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-23182408051367372162016-02-19T20:50:00.001+09:002016-02-19T20:50:49.566+09:00Canned Laughter<p><img class="aligncenter" src="http://www.hideme.io/uploads/2015/11/13/10-ridiculous-works-of-art-youre-supposed-to-take-seriously-1.jpg" alt="" width="411" height="308" /></p> <p>the day I found out<br /> that god didn&#8217;t exist<br /> was like any other day<br /> I was eating the apple<br /> during school break<br /> observed by the boys that<br /> would steal my glasses<br /> I could not imagine back then<br /> that the laughing you hear<br /> when you watch tv<br /> isn&#8217;t real</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-50796314328210526052016-02-10T22:25:00.001+09:002016-02-10T22:25:50.772+09:00Sanders - Trump<p><img class="aligncenter" src="http://40.media.tumblr.com/1ba811d0bba251f89d14626657ee9971/tumblr_nr1pbtopeK1qiys69o1_1280.jpg" alt="" width="850" height="313" /><br /> They had mounted a television set on the wall of the restaurant &#8211; there was no avoiding it. In the international news bulletin, there was Bernie Sanders calling for nothing less than a political revolution. He was more explicit about the &#8220;powers to be overthrown&#8221; than young Obama eight years ago: The one percent, corporate America, and his personal nemesis the Koch brothers were to blame for the deplorable inequality in the country. To a critical communitarian thinker like myself, the prospect of radical change or rupture in the narrative of indefinite capital accumulation cannot fail to invoke a somewhat divine lust. Not the craving for redemption to be enjoyed in apathy, but a promise that the world could once again become interesting.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t fall for Sanders, or at his feet. As long as I&#8217;m not convinced that the nationalist, imperialist rhetoric and his seemingly unreflected upon tagging along with the rusty carousel of endless economic growth, is only a political device to lure a flock of voters or devotees into electing him.</p> <p>The next image on the television was a certain Donald Trump, and what he said so perfectly illustrated that he is to Bernie as death is to life, that I can&#8217;t resist quoting it here:</p> <blockquote><p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll bring back waterboarding, I&#8217;ll bring a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding&#8221;</p></blockquote> <p>The inconvenient truth of this lies in the answer to the question, who will be subjected to this worse than waterboarding. it is not unthinkable, that Trump&#8217;s torture chambers are devised for Bernie&#8217;s revolutionaries. It would follow the logic that has proven to be so painfully adequate in human history, namely that those in power know no limits when it comes to defending their wealth.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-7355839865651049942016-01-21T09:34:00.001+09:002016-01-21T09:34:51.077+09:00I admit it: I'm a fan of Yanis Varoufakis<p><img class="alignright" src="http://assets2.vice.com/images/content-images/2015/02/02/o-varoufakis-einai-to-neo-toyboy-tou-ellinikou-internet-body-image-1422875819.jpg" alt="" width="325" height="228" /> I have watched many Youtube videos with the former Greek minister of finance, including television interviews, academic debates and a radio appearance in Australia commenting on the Greek elections as a young economics PhD. The man talks brilliantly. Because he speaks with an Oxbridge accent and adorns his well-formed sentences with tangible metaphors, he brings a subject as wry as the ECBs monetary policy to life. It&#8217;s such a delight to have public intellectuals who consistently appears in the European media &#8211; and even have them as ministers of finance. Alas, since Yanis is not the average politician, he stepped down the moment he felt he could no longer represent his voters.</p> <p>But he will be back with his<a href="http://www.euractiv.com/sections/europes-east/varoufakis-launch-new-movement-berlin-320696" target="_blank"> movement for democracy in Europe</a> and I hope he will be successful. Why do I rally &#8211; or fall &#8211; for the man? It might be his appearance and reputation as a motorcycling superhero coming to our rescue. Is it because he is a delightfully extravagant figure in the corridors of power that we tend to cynically dismiss? Is it his sharpness as a debater, his thorough understanding of economics, or his commanding eloquence?</p> <p>I know he is critical of Piketty&#8217;s &#8220;panacea&#8221; (wealth tax) to overcome the great wealth inequality, the gap that is, if you allow me to blunt the dominant leftist narrative thus, inevitably widening until we end up with another major war. I&#8217;m also a fan of Piketty (of course, he, too, is hailed as a rock star economist). But that is not it. I&#8217;ve heard Mr. Varoufakis talking about &#8220;restoring health economic growth&#8221; in almost every interview and it got my tongue itching to ask him about the circular, no-growth, post-capitalistic, economy. Of course, questioning economic growth is still anathema even to the far left side of the <em>political</em> establishment, and probably will be for decades to come.</p> <p>But Yanis is an economics professor. He should have his thoughts about slowing down economic growth, performing a soft landing to spare the belly of our transforming economies. When he talks about growth and &#8220;being competitive&#8221; on the world stage, what kind of vision for the world does that imply? Is the paradigm of growth economics also subject to democratic debate? Is economic growth in times of environmental degradation only permissible if the <em>kind</em> of growth is strictly controlled by elected experts (eg. renewables)? And if <em>such</em> growth doesn&#8217;t yield the rate the system <em>requires</em> of 3% per annum, does that mean that the system should go out of the window? Are ECB-bonds as radical as it gets?</p> <p>Think about that, Yanis, and you have my vote. I sign off with a quote I came acros in a video, that hopefully characterizes Mr. Varoufakis best.</p> <blockquote><p>&#8220;I borrow ideas from von Hayek, von Misis, Keynes, Marx, Friedman, Thatcher, from whoever has good ideas to give me. The reason why I am left-wing is because I cannot see how the accumulation of financialized capital can be made compatible with a good society &#8211; but that&#8217;s a big discussion, it&#8217;s not for now&#8221;</p></blockquote> <p><span class='embed-youtube' style='text-align:center; display: block;'><iframe class='youtube-player' type='text/html' width='640' height='390' src='http://www.youtube.com/embed/3we77fFdpVw?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;fs=1&#038;autohide=2&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;wmode=transparent' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen='true'></iframe></span></p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-13278418832171588362015-12-17T16:23:00.001+09:002015-12-17T16:23:51.908+09:00Poetry in Times of Bullshit Jobs<p>On my screen is a translation of European data protection law.</p> <p>On my ears is Beethoven&#8217;s seventh. A major.</p> <p>I listen to one of the greatest geniuses of our modernity.<br /> My fingers are moving with every measure.</p> <p>The vacuity of the language I observe, as it emerges on my screen<br /> suddenly enables me to see the sacred<br /> and unrelenting beauty of a tortured mind&#8217;s visionary breadth</p> <p>Embedded in my cocoon of emptiness, I can glimpse<br /> briefly, the wonder and irreducible joy of being in time<br /> like the shadows of a butterfly dancing on your skin<br /> as we are ourselves admitted to the sublime:</p> <p>Access is everything.<br /> so must we protect the untouchable beauty<br /> by layer upon layer<br /> of European data protection law translations?</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-42577246507833636182015-12-12T07:20:00.001+09:002015-12-12T07:20:21.181+09:00The writing is on the wall<p>An almost three-year old girl draws on everything. Miru takes her color pencils and makes her mark on the vocabulary cards that her mother has prepared for her early childhood education. Her third birthday is less than a month away and we think it&#8217;s great when she learns a lot now, while her need to turn everything into play is not yet negotiable. With her color pencils, she paints her world with blissful ignorance, unaware of climate change, religious fundamentalism and the excess that capitalism has become.</p> <p>How long will this last?</p> <p>Gradually she discovers shapes. A scribble becomes a line, a line becomes a circle. Soon she will be drawing faces that stare back at us. Then she will paint emotion on these faces. And her faces will appeal to us. She will be able to give the empathy she already feels a place in the world. The nondescript &#8220;<em>apo</em>&#8221; (ouch) that she utters now when she sees animal corpses on display in the supermarket, will turn into a confronting voice of conscience.</p> <p>I can imagine how some parents fear this stage of their toddler&#8217;s development, but I am looking forward to it. Since my twenties I haven&#8217;t been morally challenged. I have developed my arguments like habits, and they have grown dear to my heart. I have internalized my opinions with little room for the kind of rigorous self-criticism that has a prospect of changing these habits.</p> <p>Miru will develop her own voice, which means she will assume a moral authority. In a few years time she will be able to ask me the type of question that can make moral convictions shake.</p> <p>When a six-year-old girl says &#8220;but I feel it&#8217;s wrong&#8221; we should listen carefully.</p> <p><a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2015/12/cards3.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-2305" src="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/files/2015/12/cards3-300x168.jpg" alt="cards3" width="300" height="168" /></a>Miru is half that age. Her moral compass is still tilting but tends to point to <em>meio</em>, mine. But she strictly applies the same rules to her parents (interestingly enough, she doesn&#8217;t judge strangers): papa, 조심해, <em>stoep</em>! (careful! sidewalk!). This rigorous mirroring of the concept of a rule, the discovery that she can apply it to these two large humans that are always there. It is the beginning of her morality.</p> <p>She doesn&#8217;t actually draw on everything, but on enough surfaces that make it troublesome for her parents. We chase her with an eraser. The simple rule &#8220;don&#8217;t draw on that&#8221; is confusing when she sees her mother drawing. We can&#8217;t explain her the difference between a paper and a wall, or a finished educational card.</p> <p>But I&#8217;m sure my little girl will soon understand and develop a sophisticated sense of rules and right and wrong that she can and will apply critically to the world around her.</p> <p>The writing is on the wall.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5657829290249119515.post-67976042433153587432015-11-24T20:41:00.001+09:002015-11-24T20:41:33.774+09:00Hypocrisy revisited<p>I don&#8217;t like to write about the same topic <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2014/04/19/oath-of-hypocrisy/" target="_blank">twice</a>, but in the case of <a href="http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2015/01/25/dialectical-hypocrisy/" target="_blank">hypocrisy </a>I&#8217;m glad to make an exception. In what follows I promote an enhanced flavour of it, so those who believe hypocrisy to be intrinsically unsuitable as a starting point are advised to browse elsewhere. The word <a href="https://billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/hypokrites" target="_blank">ὑπόκρισις </a>is an amalgam of the Greek prefix hypo- (under), and the verb krinein (to sift or decide). ὑποκρίτης means an actor or stageplayer who is utterly devoid of sincerity. The New Testament looks at these figures with disdain. Romans famously loathe them. In Islam, hypocrites are called منافق (munafiq), those professing to the religion while concealing their disbelieve.</p> <p>I think we should not reduce hypocrisy to the idea of double standards, to paying lip-service and drinking wine while preaching water. The complex entanglement of our reality requires a more refined concept or the hypocritical. If we are always-already involved in a situation, our first utterance will by definition be inconsistent and deemed hypocritical. We may seek to redeem our position but we will get all our statements hurled back at us as proof of our disingenuousness.</p> <p>What is lacking (and Nietzsche would agree this is a clear symptom of decadence) is the subject matter, the actual thing we are hypocritical <i>about</i>. The hypocrite&#8217;s origin on the stage can enlighten us. The context is indispensable if we want to determine if a speech act is hypocritical (in our modern sense of the word). Everything can be said stage, as long as the actor follows the script, and the alcoholic playwright won&#8217;t be accused of hypocrisy when he lets his actor preach sobriety.<br /> If you want to be a hypocrite you need to be in the same realm as your interlocutor. You real intentions, however nebulous they may be, must be part of the play.</p> <p>For hypocrisy to work the speaker and the listener must be part of the same context. It doesn&#8217;t matter if that is the stage or the audience. The context of an utterance is the set of utterances we agree as relating to it. For example, the entire script of a play. A statement can change the context in which we interpret it. Consider the case when an actor suddenly shouts &#8220;fire!&#8221; on stage. The context of his sentence is extended and now includes the sentences on the fire hazard warning signs, because we interpreters agree on this extension.</p> <h2>Meta-hypocrisy</h2> <p>It is trivial that hypocrisy depends on the context of interpretation. The problem is that we don&#8217;t realize how fluid this context can become. If what we say starts to &#8220;do&#8221; things of its own, the context becomes boundless. There is only one way to make a sensible assessment of hypocrisy. We should call it hypocritical when a statement helps to brings about what it eagerly tries to prevent.</p> <p>In my view, this is what a true hypocrite sounds like:</p> <blockquote><p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t fly to your conference and ratify that wonderful treaty because I am a man of principle. It would be hypocritical to produce more carbon emissions no matter what&#8230;&#8221;</p> <p>&#8220;My absolute commitment to the struggle for gun control prevents me to defend myself and shoot that burglar, who broke into my house, and will do so in every other house of our street, killing my neighbours with an automatic rifle last night&#8230;&#8221;</p> <p>&#8220;I refuse to bribe the doorman, so a gem like myself can never get into the anti-corruption conference&#8230;&#8221;</p></blockquote> <p>These are all instances of lazy thinking. Hypocrisy is considered a moral property of the perpetrator, isolated from the crime. This choice of interpretation narrows down the concept of hypocrisy to the point that it is taken out of context, or more precisely: We assume the most convenient context from the perspective of the moralist.</p> <p>My idea is that we need to apply the concept of hypocrisy itself in a critical way. This means we need good reasons for each distinction we make (how we sift: <em>krinein</em>). It could be argued that such a procedure leads to infinite regression. The initial analysis might be hypocritical, but what makes each meta-analysis escape the same verdict? If we need a pragmatic way to stop the infinite regression, we can only draw the line exactly there, where our culture has always drawn it: around the boundaries of the individual.</p> <p>But what if this leads to absurdities such as the ones exemplified above? Shouldn&#8217;t we rethink where we draw the boundaries, how we contextualise allegedly hypocritical statements? Shouldn&#8217;t we include the results we get when we apply hypocrisy to itself? The criteria for this should be the tacit assumption of the original hypocrisy. The flesh that is hurt by that hypocrisy. This is ignored when we focus only on the abstract idea of hypocrisy.</p> <p>This doesn&#8217;t mean we should step into the morass of relativism. It means we need to see the dangers of relativism more clearly. Our world is changing so rapidly that any guidance by abstract ideas our forebears distilled in another era, can be dangerous.</p> <h2>Introducing hypercrisy</h2> <p>I propose to call the art of applying a concept to itself for just enough iterations, &#8220;hypercrisy&#8221;. Hypercrisy is an amalgam of the Greek prefix hyper-, meaning &#8220;over&#8221;, and the verb krinein, meaning &#8220;to sift or decide&#8221;. Its sole purpose is to arrive at a judgement that is superior considered in the greatest number of contexts. How do we determine what how many iterations are &#8220;enough&#8221;? When should we stop applying the concept to itself? In practice two or three iterations will do, so the question is of mere academic significance. I would say the iterations never end. All our judgements are preliminary. We are not sitting on God&#8217;s throne and we don&#8217;t have the ultimate answers (that&#8217;s what makes life fun). But doesn&#8217;t that mean we fall prey to relativism after all? I think this is not the case. First of all, hypercrisy is a precisely defined procedure of reasoning we can apply, the merit of which, I allow myself the audacity to say, we &#8220;hold as true and self-evident&#8221;. Second, the danger of &#8220;relativism&#8221; is neutralized because hypercrisy takes its toxic tendency to undermine everything at face value. The hypercrite can inocculate herself with relativism.</p> <p>If we could make sane assessments of situations like the ones mentioned above, we would label the presumed hypocrites as hypercrites of a certain degree. It would re-open the debate on the issue their hypocrisy was <i>about</i>. Hypercrite wouldn&#8217;t be a derogative designed to shut people up who try to pull themselves at the bootstraps out of the contradiction they&#8217;ve fallen into, but a compliment to encourage the self-application of their reasoning to a healthy degree.</p> <p>You think I should define for you what &#8220;healthy&#8221; means? Let&#8217;s have a hypercritical conversation about that. Coffee&#8217;s on me.</p> Kamiel Choihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14741568672101360445noreply@blogger.com0